How much heat can gel rounds take? Can you fire them on full autofire without them either exploding or melting or whatever it is they do when they overheat?

~J

Gel exploding when it overheats? Sounds weird, but I have no clue what Gel rounds are really supposed to be, either. Melting I could understand, which might foul up the barrel might quick if you fired a few hundred through a machine gun.

Exploding being a bit of hyperbole. Closer to popping than exploding.

~J

Well, acording to SR3 they're "semi-rigid slugs"... So I guess they're quite similar to rubber bullets, only a bit more eh, squishy. At worst they'd probably expand enough that they didn't fire properly, or perhaps melt and make a right mess of your weapon. But really, I wouldn't worry about it myself. The rules don't mention it being a problem, and that's good enough for me on this one.

Per canon, yes. In terms of real life, gel rounds already create enough problems elsewhere for this to be a notable single issue. I guess I'd only allow SA, personally.

[edit]

Come to think of it, might force manual weapon cycling with them, too.

I cant imagine why they wouldnt be compatible with full auto fire by the 2060's. Despite the apparent stagnation of weapons design in SR we know that chemistry (and practically every other field) has advanced by leaps and bounds so I think it is safe to say they have come up with something that would do the trick. Also, aren't most non lethals designed at least partially with riot control in mind? I'd certainly hope for a more effective way to deal with a frenzied mob then one at a time.

If you look at most less lethal shotgun rounds, you'll note that very few automatic shotguns will successfully cycle them. That's most what I'm going off of.

True enough. I have to agree with Zeel De Mort though. I think they are simply "squishy rubber bullets".

You could probably make something recoil operated to fire gell rounds in SA mode, thugh you probably couldn't fire regular rounds in it. The problem the SAQ shoguns have is that they are gas operated, and the gel rounds are very low pressure. Which means that they do not generate enoguh gas pressure to cycle the action. Really gel rounds should be limited to shotguns, since you need the projectile mass that only a shotgun or other large bore firearm can deliver.

You can make the gel the core of the bullet with a hard casing that discards with in inches of leaving the barrel similar to way discarding sabot slugs work today.
bullet is fired, air friction sheds the shell seven centimeters out of the barrel, the gel expands to look something like an inverted/sideways W/pointy end towards target teardrop, teardrop hits, expands to surface, corp secretary-01 fall down unconsious.

Hopefully.

This is, of course, right after the sabot has already imbedded itself in the corp secretary's brainpan... The sabot is going to be dangerous is the typically short range you will be suing gel rounds. It will probably be lethal out to around 10 feet and dangerous out to 25 (50?), and you have almost no idea of the path the sabot is going to follow...

I have to say, I can recall the first time our team took gel rounds as our main ammo instead of regular rounds and we still managed to kill one poor guy from overflow when a couple of us shot him at the same time...with pistols.

Suppose you could say the "gel" rounds are actually "Stun" and that they and that they expand and open (like air brakes) for a larger surface area, but then you have problems with range and such

To my knowledge, converting a gun to fire simunitions, even on full auto, requires a barrel replacement and maybe some other tuning. Not terrible intensive work, but not something you can do in the field, either.

If you're concerned about them not cycling properly, get a revolver. Won't hold as much, but shouldn't have any trouble loading. (Just a hunch here, could be wrong)

I know from bitter experience that Gel rounds are anything but non-lethal- in a game last weekend one of my players almost killed outright three people with gel rounds from an M23 (two on serious wounds, one on deadly). The kicker was that the most he fired was a three-round burst, and one ended up downed by a single round. It's not the rounds that are the problem, but the players who don't know when to stop adding combat pool...

-JH.

I'm confused. How could a single three round burst kill with Gel rounds? The most you should be able to do is Deadly stun damage with a single burst...

JaronK

IIRC, there are optional staging rules that allow for staging beyond deadly stun at a rate of one box of physical per two successes.

Wow. That's a WHOLE LOT of successes, then, if you're worried about killing people with them. If you're at the point where you're getting close to 20 successes, perhaps you should start taking called shots at their feet or something to cut down on lethality...

Doesn't really take much. Fire a burst, staging up to S; successes stage to D. Then a team mate, feeling plucky, decides to make sure the guy goes down and does the same thing. Whoops.

Are you sure it's only one box? I thought it overflowed in the usual L-M-S-D configuration…

~J

Hell no, that would give me nightmares.

It's frightening how easy it is- your bog-standard M23 does 8M, so that's 6M Stun with Gel rounds. Firing a burst, that's 9S Stun. Now say Experienced Ex-Military Runner X decides to fire using his skill of 7, plus six dice of combat pool. He's at about fifty metres with his rifle shouldered, off-hand on foregrip, looking down the lowlight scope at the pretty red dot of his laser sight centre-mass on his target. His first simple action before shooting is to aim. His TNs are 2. On average rounding down, he'll get ten successes, quite sufficient to stage the damage up to deadly physical (five stages, each needing two successes- whether it's the standard rules or just us, our normal procedure is to stage from Stun into physical at the same rate, essentially meaning there are four 'more' damage levels). And thus the quarterback is toast.
As to the actual effects and whether it's possible to kill someone with a gel round, I'm running on the idea that my gunbunny player got one round a little high, catching his slow-on-uptake target in the temple. Skull fractures and significant neural damage even from a short sharp blow that doesn't break the skin can often be fatal, or at least enough to dump NPC Z in intensive care for a month or two...

-JH.

So, that'd explain why that rule is optional.

No need to get that complicated. Internal hemmoraging from blunt trauma can be quite enough to kill you.

If you keep it at +1 box/2 successes, as the rule actually goes, it's no problem. To kill a guy with that, you either need to be a phenomenal shot (22 successes with S base damage), or put a burst into a guy that's already been dropped unconscious.

Regardless, such ammo shouldn't really be even that lethal. Certainly you can kill someone with rubber bullets, but you can't kill an unconscious person as easily with rubber bullets as you can with standard ammunition IRL. Halved Power/-1 DL when doing Physical with such ammo would be great, but a bit difficult to implement, because it mostly occurs as overflow from Stun to Physical.